1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a pallet arranging system for use with a part assembler supplied with pallets and printed circuit boards, each pallet having cartridges each containing parts to be mounted onto the printed circuit boards by the assembler. More particularly, the invention relates to a pallet arranging system that creates channel setting data for designating which cartridge is to be assigned to which channel of a pallet group comprising a plurality of pallets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent years have seen electronic apparatuses shrinking in size and loosing more weight even as their functionality is increasingly diversified. The trend has required that printed circuit board units making up such apparatuses be enhanced in packaging density. With smaller and more complex parts to be mounted in greater numbers, the part assembling work hitherto done by manual labor with growing difficulty is currently being taken over by increasing numbers of automated part assemblers. These machines are expensive, and labor costs are also rising at the factories. Thus there is recognized an acute need to run the equipment unattended as much as possible for higher efficiency.
There exist part assemblers fed with pallets and printed circuit boards, each pallet having cartridges each containing parts to be mounted by the machines where designated onto the printed circuit boards. Part assemblers of this type retrieve parts one by one from each cartridge in the pallet, and assemble these parts in a predetermined order onto the printed circuit boards. Where a part assembler is to be run unattended, it is necessary to prepare beforehand the channel setting data for designating which cartridge is to be assigned to which channel of the pallet group as well as the numerical control data for specifying printed circuit board positions into which to assemble the parts.
In a multiple-item small-lot production setup, the same production line may have to deal with different types of products. In that case, the machines on the production line need to have their production settings re-established or modified every time a different product is to be handled. That is, preparatory steps such as machine readjustments and changing of materials are called for. Take the above-mentioned part assemblers for example. These machines require carrying out many steps to change the pallets involved between production runs. In this respect, those printed circuit boards that are handled collectively by the same process should preferably be arranged into a single group. But there are yet to be proposed pallet arranging systems that take this point, into consideration.